VA researchers receive nation's top award for early career scientists

FORUM

July 26, four U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) researchers will receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), which is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers at the beginning of their independent research careers who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.

Super Moderator

VA researchers invented the first clinically successful cardiac pacemaker, in 1960. This invention prevents potentially life-threatening complication for irregular heartbeats in many patients.​

In 1958, Dr. William Chardack of the Buffalo VA hospital (now the Buffalo VA Medical Center) teamed up with engineer Wilson Greatbatch and Dr. Andrew Gage to implant an electrode in a dog attached to a pulse generator. They worked for the next two years to refine their design of a unit that could be implanted in the body and would maintain the same pulse rhythm for long periods of time.

In 1960, they implanted a pacemaker into a 77-year-old man, who lived for 10 months after the surgery. In that year, they implanted pacemakers into nine other patients, several of whom lived for more than 20 years after the implant. Chardack and Greatbatch's design was the first implanted pacemaker to be commercially produced.

It should be pointed out that:

"John Hopps, an electrical engineer, was recruited on a part-time basis by the National Research Council of Canada and designed what was perhaps the first electronic device specifically built as a cardiac pacemaker. It was an external unit driven by vacuum tubes. The electrical impulses were transmitted via a bipolar catheter electrode to the atria using a transvenous approach. Atrial pacing was readily achieved and heart rate could be controlled with no uncomfortable chest wall contractions."
---->A brief history of cardiac pacing LINK